A Ticket to Ride

The answer is: Nowhere.

It’s 1991. A man with long hair, dressed in jeans and boots, wearing a leather jacket, walks off a plane in London’s Heathrow Airport. He has an old army ruck on his shoulder, a 35mm camera slung across his body. A thin man with blonde hair in a customs uniform approaches him. Eyeing him he says:

“Are you familiar with British customs laws?”

The traveler stops and thinks for a minute and says “not really”

The customs officer replies, “Well then you might be a smuggler, might you?”

The man is taken aback, eyebrows raised.

The agent dismisses him. Going through security for his next flight, he’s required to open the camera to show it’s empty of contraband.

It’s 2005. A man walks quickly through a secure area of Philadelphia Airport. He has to make a connecting flight. His first international flight has arrived late. Customs and airport security officers yell at the passengers as they rush though the corridor like a cattle chute, telling them to have their passports ready and to quickly grab their bags. The man thinks they’re quite rude in the “city of brotherly love.”

It’s 2009. A man is sleeping on the floor in LAX. His flight is delayed. Why? According to the captain, a child has dropped a toy into the aircraft toilet, blocking the pipe. They’ll need to get it repaired before they can take off. Everyone return to the airport gate. Unfortunately, the pilots will “time out,” and now new pilots may need to be secured.

It’s 2024. An older man stands in a long queue at Boston’s Logan airport. He knows the drill. He wears slip on shoes so he can remove them as he gets close to the airport scanners. He’s not wearing a belt and had nothing in his pockets. He’s wearing socks that don’t need darning. He expertly grabs a tray, separating his electronics in one, his shoes hat and jacket in another. He drops his cell and wallets in with the clothes and listens to the security officer barking orders at the human lemmings as he steps into the booth, and raises his hands over his head as if he has surrendered. The truth is , he has capitulated in this battle.The officer nods to him, and he is allowed to proceed.

According to Business Insider:

• A minority of frequent flyers take the largest share of flights in almost all countries with the highest aviation emissions.
• In the US, 12 per cent of people take two thirds (66 per cent) of all flights, while in France 2 per cent of people take half (50 per cent) of all the flights.
• In almost all these countries, less than half of the population fly each year.

It seems most people, particularly outside of the U.S., don’t fly often, or at all. Some of us are required to fly for work, and fly quite a bit.

Why do we fly so much in the U.S.? Perhaps it’s because the United States is big, and unlike other countries, our employers are stingy with vacation time. If you need to travel, a plane trip is often a the only option with our limited vacation time if we must travel in country.

Now to the point. Your old buddy Jack has been flying for years, and in his humble experience, air travel is a miserable experience. It’s always been lousy. The airlines have simply crafted an image that it’s glamorous. It is not. I only fly if it’s an absolute necessity.

You are “meat freight.” The goal is to get you into the smallest possible space, where you’ll receive a token bag of snacks and beverage as an indication of service by some poor flight attendant who might be worried that you’re the crazy one who is going to try to open the aircraft door mid flight, or engage in a drunken brawl. We sit in this pressurized cattle car waiting to be released at our final destination, where we will filter back out into the sterile terminal held in a secure area until our next leg of our journey.

I’ve been lucky to travel the world, and have flown for years, but friends, virtually every other mode of travel is more enjoyable. Trains, busses, automobiles, ships and your own two feet are all much better alternatives to air travel. We’ve been conditioned to believe if you must travel you must fly.

Now, let’s rephrase the prompt, because perhaps what was really meant is, “if you could go anywhere at no expense, where would you go?”

To this I would offer two possibles.

1. I’d love to hike in Scotland. I’ve enjoyed my visits to the the Republic of Ireland, and It’s neighbor England, but have yet to venture to the north in the U.K.
2. I would return to New Zealand and do some “tramping” there. I’m told the hiking is amazing.

Assuming I had unlimited time, I’d load up my pack right now, climb the gangway, and get on a boat to those places.

Bon voyage!